Like many others, I was excited by the announcement of Project Eternity by Obisidian Entertainment. At last, a game based on the one-season Canadian eschatological sci-fi thriller. Then I realized that that was Codename: Eternity, and I would have to redo this whole open. And it wasn't actually a very funny conceit in any case.

Project Eternity by Obsidian Entertainment

Like many others, I was excited by the announcement of Project Eternityby Obsidian Entertainment. Also like many others, I had grown up with the adventures in the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons created by, among others, Black Isle Studios.

Although technology has moved on, the two-dimensional heroics and anti-heroics of Planescape:Torment, Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale remain fondly remembered. Obsidian Entertainment shares a CEO, Feargus Urquhart, and many staff with Black Isle Studios, and has since made a name for itself by embracing similar values, creating story-driven, ambitious (sometimes overly so) action RPGs like Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas.

So, the news that some of the legends of the age - including Obsidian's head creative Chris Avellone, Tim Cain (one of the three founders of Troika, a studio as absurdly talented as it was ill-served by fate) and Josh Sawyer were seeking Kickstarted funds to return to that game style gave fans and journalists alike pause, then palpitations.

Nostalgia - the one thing better than it used to be?

Nostalgia is turning out to be a powerful business model on Kickstarter, although nostalgia might not be the right word for original IP built largely in a modern game development engine. Perhaps this is more about a realization that the formats of the past are not actually defunct, and, compared with the capital expenditure and the potential downside risk of a full-scale AAA product, these games could provide just as much entertainment, but with a smaller team or shorter development cycles

Even after years of optimization and automation, introducing detailed characters interacting with a fully voiced script in full 3D hugely increases the necessary complexity of models and their interactions in the world. Simply creating AI that can navigate a three-dimensional world without getting stuck has been the undoing of many a game.

If you are prepared to sacrifice 3D, then, this provides a lot of interesting developmental headroom. Brian Fargo of inXile started the ball rolling with this discovery, raising nearly $3 million to fund a sequel to his 1988 game Wasteland - a sum which allowed Avellone and Obsidian to join this project, and which in turn informed the decision to adopt a similar approach to a new property.

Project Eternity had no problem reaching their $1.1 million goal, and at the time of writing are edging past $2 million, with 20 days left to go. Fairly presently, they may have to start thinking up imaginative stretch goals - so far, goodies have included a DRM-free edition of the game, sold by GOG.com, the suppliers to many an RPG addict, a novella set in the game's (still largely mysterious) setting, and soon the promise of further localization.

Kickstarter funding has advantages beyond the obvious (the winds of freedom in one's hair, the hearts of the funding crowd beating as one). Self-publishing offers the possibility to explore content that a mainstream publisher would balk at, and also removes the necessity for market-driven console ports.

It may be a shocking reflection on the paucity of imagination in fantasy generally, but a dwarf with a bow near a tree is itself kind of startling. Where's the crossbow? And the mines?

All of which serves only to obscure the real question - how Welsh will the elves be? My people may not get many action hero roles, but we've got the elves pretty much sewn up. I asked Chris Avellone by email what he could tell us about the world of Project Eternity.

A lot of the strength of an RPG world lies in its foundation: its systems, lore, and when appropriate, its magic systems. While there are elements tied to Project: Eternity that at first glance seem to be classic fantasy, that’s intentional – we do want to recreate some elements of a High Fantasy experience. At the same time, however, while you may recognize certain archetypes, they’re also used as a means to draw people in, make assumptions, and then we turn those assumptions on their head to deliver a new experience.

The concept of souls, for example, is not treated lightly in this world. They persist from person to person, some fracturing, some maintaining their integrity over time, and they are a source of power in the world that players can draw upon – and their enemies can as well. We want to examine how such a fundamental world mechanic can change the shape of a people, a culture, a nation, and a world… as well as the individual. What would such a world be like with this kind of underlying mechanic? That’s one of the many questions that interest us, and they’re the ones we want to explore.

Josh Sawyer has provided more detail on the world, which will aparently be set in a new universe positioned roughly at the apex of medieval civilization, with some early black-powder weapons, gothic architecture and plate armored knights remaining the tanks of the battlefield. Plus elves, dwarves and the usual demihuman suspects - but, we are promised, with a twist.

Slain by elf

Kickstarter, of course, is itself product selling with a twist. Persuading customers to pay in advance for a product scheduled to arrive in spring 2014 is an impressive feat. What sort of audience does Avellone see for games in the style of the state of the art a decade ago? Are the people funding Kickstarter campaigns like this and Fargo's Wasteland 2 old hands at the adventure game, or is a new audience being attracted?

That’s been one of our topics of discussion over beers at a local developer watering hole – the conversation began with “how many people do you think knew about Wasteland before Brian Fargo’s Kickstarter?”

The implication is there wasn’t initially a strong push for a sequel until the idea of Kickstarter, and it was the idea of the old school RPG itself, the fight against the publisher model, and the Kickstarter process that ended up being the “hook” that people were looking for.

I’ll be honest and say that a chunk of our fanbase may not have played the Infinity Engine games, but they may be responding to many of the same elements that resonated with the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter and are willing to support those.

For example, they may be Obsidian fans willing to support the company, they may be people that want to see an RPG of our creation regardless of format, or they may be fans of developers inside the studio (like my unabashed fanboyism for Tim Cain – and his cooking). We are thankful for all of these things.

I’d like to believe that the majority of our supporters did play the old school Infinity Engine games and know what makes them special to us. I don’t have any metrics for this, however. I can only trust MY SOUL (explicit circular reference to answer to first question).

Wherever the audience has come from, it is certainly eager to put in its money. So, about those stretch goals...

We have discussions on stretch goals almost on a daily basis, and often the ideas for those stretch goals come from the public themselves. Among requests we’ve seen are mod tools and mod tool support, and we’d love to be able to bring that about. No promises yet, but anything that allows the fans and the community to add content that we can then play is a double blessing, and we loved seeing people’s creations with the GECK (Garden of Eden Creation Kit - a set of modding tools) in Fallout: New Vegas as well as creating some of our own (Josh Sawyer created a mod for the game which rebalanced it to his own tastes, and repeatedly updated it).

Edair (Body 'air not shown)

Of course, one significant difference between then and now - then being the golden age of BioWare's Infinity Game engine, running from Baldur's Gate in 1998 to Icewind Dale 2 in 2002 - is that I am carrying in my pocket a device which could not only run a game that represented a cutting-edge technological proposition at the time, but also could probably be used to build it.

As a designer, I asked Avellone, how does it feel to come back to working on something recognizably like those Infinity Engine-driven games again, compared with something like Fallout: New Vegas - which used the now more traditional first-and-third person viewpoint to explore a detailed three-dimensional world? How have the tools on the back end changed, and what do you need to build to make the game?

I enjoyed working on Fallout: New Vegas and our more recent titles, and I love working on Infinity Engine-style games as well (they’re among my first titles I got the chance to be a part of in this industry, and I enjoyed playing them also). Not much is different in terms of technology needed (if anything, the constraints are less), and with engines like Unity, constructing that kind of Infinity Engine experience is pretty painless, as I’ve discovered with Wasteland 2 so far. Another nice thing I’ve discovered is that the camera view and party options allow for a different kind of combat and encounter layout experience, and it hearkens back to my old table-top experiences as well, so it’s a double-blast of nostalgia.

The choice of Unity, the open-source gaming engine, is an interesting note - Obsidian's own Onyx engine is also being used for some of the more tradtional RPG elements, where it is obviously strong - Obsidian are known for their in-game conversations and characterization. Unity also exports flexibly to a multitude of formats - this starting decision makes ports to Mac and Linux possible. Unity also exports easily to mobile platforms - but Avellone restated Project Eternity's commitment to the PC platform - no mobile versions will be forthcoming, just as no console version will be forthcoming. For RPG enthusiasts bemoaning the compromises they see being made by studios like BioWare and CD Projekt – the leading lights of the RPG genre - in the name of console-friendliness, this should come as a relief.

Keeping the faith

Project Eternity probably could not have existed without Kickstarter, or at least existed easily: the business logic of diverting a measurable amount of a studio’s staff to a game updating decade-old game mechanics and with an uncertain audience simply would not add up. At least, not when that studio could be making the larger games for which it is known.

So old school that the the chantry system has yet to create what are now recognized as schools

However, for some the business logic functions differently. Jeff Vogel founded Spiderweb Software in 1995, making turn-based role-playing games. As the market progressed, he kept making the same kind of game, and people kept buying them. Not AAA numbers of people, but his costs were not AAA costs, and he didn’t need to make AAA sales. Before Steam and the iTunes app store, he banked on selling 5,000 copies of his games to the hardcore at $25, and sell mod kits, extensions and supplementary materials. Steam and the App Store have changed that game, opening up a huge new market of digital downloaders and massively simplifying the mechanism of the “in-app purchase”. When his games reached new markets, they sold more – meaning that there were untapped potential players waiting to know that classic RPGs were still out there, and for a chance to buy them. Vogel sees these new big-name projects as proof of an extending market…

There is a real market for games like this, and it's underserved. The success of the Project Eternity kickstarter shows that there is money in games like this. Not enough for Activision or EA to care, but enough for a lot of developers to make good livings.

This is a kind of game production that operates under the radar of the major publishers – it is not worth their scale to address an enthusiast market. But publishers don’t make games – and, when it comes to Kickstarter-level budgets, they are not required to fund games either.

Vogel’s essay, Principles of an Indie Game Bottom-Feeder, is a great guide to creating games in a niche, and how the finances of doing so stack up. I asked him what it felt like to see major players, with crowdfunded seven-figure budgets, moving back into the old school space. His response was sanguine:

It doesn't worry me at all. I used to worry about these sorts of projects, until I noticed that, when they came out, my sales never went down.

You see, a market without competitors is a dead market. The success of their games increases the number of players who like games like mine, which directly benefits me. It's great!

It seems the elf care industry can expect business to remain good for some time to come.

Project Eternity, by Obsidian Entertainment, is scheduled for an April 2014 release.

I am currently a Contributing Editor at Wired Magazine in the UK, having written for Wired UK since its launch in 2009, and speak regularly on the impact of developing technologies on consumer behaviors at Wired Consulting events and elsewhere.